Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short

Some thoughts for today.

Friday, 15 December, 2006

iPhone on Monday? That’s the word. All it has to be is iconic, like the iPod, and elegant with an idiot-proof UI. However, it supposedly comes in two versions with a massive price gap between the two. The cheap one will be uncannily similar to the iPod Nano with phone, text messaging and a couple of games. It will run the iPod games. The expensive one will be or be similar to the Blackberry. Basically, it will simply be a really, really well implemented mobile phone.

Starting Monday I am “on vacation” and wholly unprepared. I have something to do during this time and because I’ve somehow managed to hose a fair amount of my OS settings which I have not had to fix through three OS upgrades. I’m trying to figure out how to save everything worthwhile while reformatting all the disks and installing from scratch. Eliminating duplicates which I know I have but I don’t know just what would be a bonus. In short, I need about 220 GB of additional space but don’t want to actually buy a hard drive and install it just for this. I should order a DVD burner from Newegg or something over the weekend, shouldn’t I?

I will be sick again starting Monday morning. I will require distractions and will not be able to drive or pilot a bicycle starting Tuesday. Perhaps you know what I am getting at without my actually saying it. I hope by Festivus all will be well, more or less, but …

I am hoping I can commence a new era of my getting “out there” wherever that is. I seldom say this, but it may be clear that I am beginning to hurt myself with all of the aloneness. I honestly can’t imagine what is “out there” which will not fill me with contempt. Whether something is worthy of contempt does not appear to have any bearing on my ability to perceive it that way.

When Kodak announced that they were abandoning the consumer-film market they were regarded as doing so much too soon. As it turns out, they were exactly right. Indeed, Kodak’s absence from the market has provided greater share for their former competition who are now losing money on every sale in an attempt to salvage the market. Through a series of links I was directed to this statement allegedly from someone in the front office at the Sangean North America HQ:

No, Sangean will not release a new Shortwave radio. The closest thing
to it will be our DRM-40, featuring DRM, Digital Radio Mondale,
digital shortwave. The reason being that we have over the past 5 years
seen a 50% reduction in the shortwave category. People unfortunately
are not interested in SW.

Based upon what I read from the mail lists with the world’s most obsessed DXers on it, Sangean is correct. One finds comments about the World Radio Network, Sirius and XM and of course just plain streaming over the internet. In Europe one finds popularly priced wi-fi radios. While available over here, they are not popularly priced. We may be entering a new golden age of shortwave like the 1980s, but the medium still has a rather high learning curve. More folks than not have an MP3 player on a computer in the house. Ii is time. The world is too large for traditional broadcasting, and the new media are less regulated and somewhat less likely to be censored.